Rappers & Knockers

NOTHING SO STRANGE (250 pp.)--Arthur Ford, with Margueritte Harmon Bro--Harper ($3.75).

It seems to be getting harder all the time to raise spirits from the vasty deep, and if it were not for a few medium-rare souls, including Arthur Ford, magical goings-on would be largely confined to the hinterlands of Africa, the Caribbean islands and Tibet. The author of this book, a professional medium and onetime minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), was once urged by his familiar spirits to get out of the stock market. The time was 1929, and, wherever it came from, it was a rattling good tip. The recipient naturally believed that in the voices of spirits there was great wisdom.

Spiritualist Ford's autobiographic apologia does not demand agreement from the reader; table rapper as well as spirit knocker can enjoy it as the record of an unusual man. Ford first noticed that he was unusual when a shavetail at Camp Grant. It was late in World War I, and thousands of soldiers were dying of influenza. Lieut. Ford had to pick up the lists of dead, and one morning he realized that he knew what the names would be before he got the lists. At a loss to explain his strange precognition, he wrote Mother back in Florida to ask if there might be some insanity in the family. Well, in a way, Mother reluctantly replied: there was Auntie Mary--the one the family never talked about. She was a medium.

Snoddy, Tubby & Moody. Out of the army and in Transylvania College (Lexington, Ky.), Ford took his troubles to Psychology Professor Elmer Snoddy. Together they rapped tables, and Ford soon felt himself in his spiritual talents to be one with "Wesley, Luther, Swedenborg, Dwight Moody, not to overlook a high proportion of the saints." Miss Gertrude Tubby, secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research, encouraged the "young and eager psychic," and soon Ford was in London, way beyond the league of Snoddy, Tubby or even Moody. One night, several hundred pounds sterling worth of gems manifested themselves at a seance patronized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Ford drew a garnet.

Author Ford writes with complete conviction of his own psychic powers. At his own seances, spirits of the dead ("discarnates," he calls them) manifest themselves through Ford. No historic figures have appeared at Ford's beck and call, and he is suspicious of mediums who claim they can get through to the well-known dead.

Haloed Cabbage. Ford records the early history of the spiritualist movement in the U.S., when it was chivvied by police. Today the law is more tolerant and scientists less skeptical of psychic phenomena. Non-spiritualists, however, will still be depressed by the sad fact that spirits sometimes choose to communicate with the living in such down-at-heel language; it suggests that a lot of education goes to waste when people die.

Ford writes with some humor of highflying cranks in a spiritualist camp, including one woman who would eat no "dead" food; before she would touch a cabbage, she had to see its aura (a sort of halo that Ford and others claim to observe about people's heads). But his humor breaks down when he expounds his own spiritualist program. The student psychic is told to relax from his toes right up "to the hair follicles," and to bring an unclouded ego to the job of developing his latent spiritual powers. Ford himself began to develop in a big way during a 20-year bender, and notes that many cured alcoholics have psychic gifts. Apparently they go right on seeing things after they give up the sauce.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.